LONDON // An investigation was launched yesterday into the activities of a Muslim charity in Britain that invited a controversial Indian preacher to address its conference. The investigation by the government's charities watchdog is the latest twist in a story that began to unfold last week when Theresa May, Britain's home secretary, decided to bar Dr Zakir Naik from entering Britain for a lecture tour.
Dr Naik, who has millions of followers worldwide through his Mumbai-based, free-to-air satellite channel Peace TV, was subsequently banned from entering Canada for a conference there. Civil rights groups in the UK have launched a campaign to get Mrs May to revoke her exclusion order - made on the grounds of Dr Naik's "unacceptable behaviour" - because of its implications for freedom of speech, while lawyers for the preacher were yesterday attempting to mount a legal challenge to the ban.
His supporters say that Dr Naik's most controversial remark that "every Muslim should be a terrorist" has been taken out of context and that, anyway, it was made before he was granted a five-year visitors' visa to the UK in 2008. The unexpected twist came with the confirmation yesterday from the Charity Commission that it was looking into the charitable status of the Birmingham-based Islamic Dawah Centre International (IDCI), which had invited Dr Naik to a conference, which has since been cancelled.
Commissioners decided to begin the investigation after the Sunday Mercury newspaper in Birmingham reported that the centre was selling books including works by Sayyid Qutb, a fundamentalist Egyptian imam who is said to have inspired Osama bin Laden to establish al Qa'eda. Other titles in the IDCI collection were said to include Dr Naik's Islam and Terrorism, and Towards Understanding Islam by Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi, a founder of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party in Pakistan. Roger Godsiff, a Birmingham MP, said: "If this registered charity has invited this man to speak, and if there is also concern about them selling this sort of literature, then the Charity Commission is duty-bound to investigate."
However, a spokesman for the IDCI insisted: "We don't stock extremist material. All of our books have been cleared by the authorities. The copy of Milestones by Sayyid Qutb is not the one that has been banned, it is the original text which is perfectly peaceful. "We distribute publications to promote peace and understanding through Islam, and that is one of the aims of Dr Zakir Naik. The government had no grounds for excluding him, and an appeal is going through the High Court at the moment."
A spokesman for the Charity Commission said: "Concerns have been raised with the Charity Commission regarding the Islamic Dawah Centre International. We are currently assessing these concerns in order to establish what, if any, regulatory role the commission might have." Meanwhile, lawyers representing Dr Naik were attempting to obtain a judicial review of Mrs May's decision to exclude the preacher even though a Home Office spokesman said that there was no legal right of appeal to such a decision.
Majeed Memon described the move by the UK government as "barbaric and inhuman" and said that it flew in the face of natural justice because of the five-year visitors' visa granted to Dr Naik two years ago. Dr Naik visited the UK and gave several lectures then, none of them leading to any perceived threats to national security, public order or the safety of citizens - the reasons under which Mrs May has a right to exclude people from the UK.
The Islamic Research Foundation, the Mumbai-based organisation of which Dr Naik is president, announced on Saturday that it was instructing lawyers in London to try and overturn the ban. @Email:dsapsted@thenational.ae